While she hints at a great and deep affinity with her grandmother, she lays down her boundaries firmly. The Wife’s Tale” is based on Aida Edemariam’s 60-hour long conversation with her grandmother, Yetemegnu Mekonnen (Nannye), that spans 20 years.

Born sometime in the 1920s, Yètèmegnu has lived her life with forbearance but also with courage, creativity and love; she nourishes many people with her own hands, including the infant of a destitute family left with her during the famine of 1984. She alludes to a couple of trips back (she now lives in Oxford), but we learn nothing of her possible deracination or her emotional relationship with Ethiopia now.Being a native of Gojjam “where everyone knew the evil eye flourished,” complicated Tsega’s relationship to the people of Gondar and significantly so after he became Aleqa. The opening scene takes place in 1924, when, aged eight, Yetemegnu is married to Tsega Teshale, more than two decades her senior. After his restoration in 1941, Yètèmegnu falls back into an enervating cycle of childbirth and illness, the narrative slackening as many years pass with little change.

The wedding scene distils the wonder and confusion of the child bride who feels something remarkable is happening but is barely cognisant of what it means: “The long black cape was lined, the heavy gold filigree around the collar and down the front made it heavy, and it was getting heavier. She describes how her father went to study in Canada and there met his wife (Edemariam’s mother), but she does not dwell on her birth, early life in Ethiopia, or departure.A week ago I knew almost nothing about Ethiopia, except that it is Orthodox Christian and that there was a dreadful famine in the 1980s that my malapropism-prone great-aunt once referred to as “the famine in Utopia”.

Edemariam, a Guardian journalist, says in her acknowledgments that she spent years reading Ethiopian history “before I could begin to understand the world in which she [Yetemegnu] grew up”. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Another exceptional moment is Yetemegnu’s “wayward” experience with the zar, a ritual that can only be captured by one’s own lived experience. This is a loving portrait of a grandmother, undiminished by the distances between the author and her subject.

In this elegant account, Aida Edemariam has sketched her grandmother’s life in an Ethiopia that shifted, within 50 years, from feudal monarchy to Marxist dictatorship. In this remarkable book that also strikingly nudged my own memory, Aida tells us about Yetemegnu’s ordinary life, which in turn evokes the extraordinary lives of Ethiopian women who lived at a certain moment of history; our mothers and grandmothers whose stories are forgotten in contemporary memory.